He Najuan and Dai Xuehong: A New Exploration of Gayatri Spivak's Postcolonial Feminist Critique
In the second half of the 20th century, economic development in capitalist countries flourished and labor-capital contradictions were mitigated; consequently, doubts arose as to whether Marxism could continue to serve as an effective model for political liberation. However, Western Marxist theorists such as Walter Benjamin and David Harvey argued that the brutal working conditions of Third World female workers and children, along with the reality of their exploitation by First World capital, closely resemble Marx's 19th-century critique of European capitalism. Marxism still provides the core intellectual framework for theoretical analysis for many Third World intellectuals. For many postcolonial theorists, Marxism is the blueprint for their theoretical work: "If postcolonial theory is the cultural product of decolonization, it is also the historical product of Marxism in the anti-colonial field." In this context, Gayatri C. Spivak, a postcolonial feminist critical theorist with strong concerns for social reality, devoted herself to the study of Marxist theory. Spivak was among the first feminist scholars in the field of postcolonial critique to interpret the crisis management [1] of imperialism. Within the political landscape of capitalism and the contemporary international division of labor, Spivak argues that explaining the world solely through the lenses of cultural studies and ideological critique fails to touch the essence of capitalism. Such approaches obscure the suffering and oppression experienced by people under barbaric, real material conditions. Spivak emphasizes that the rethinking of cultural studies should be linked to the economic and social transformations occurring in the postcolonial world—that is, the dimension of economic critique must be retained in contemporary cultural and political critique.
I. Defining the Problem: The Contemporary Turn in Imperialist Crisis Management
The so-called theory of imperialist crisis management refers to the inherent economic, political, and social crises that exist within imperialism as a specific socio-historical formation. In the reality of postcolonialism, imperialism achieves the internal adjustment and external displacement of contradictions through global production and global exploitation, ensuring that the relations of production adapt to the development of the productive forces. Internally, imperialism introduces welfare policies and state distribution policies to form a community of interests that shares the "dividends of exploitation," thereby weakening and dissolving the resistance capacity of the working class. Externally, imperialism utilizes existing international trade organizations and security mechanisms to exert control over Third World production systems, absorbing surplus value from across the globe. In this process, media and culture, communication technologies, and knowledge systems are all embedded into crisis management.
With the development of globalization, the international character of capitalist regimes has intensified, drawing people of all nations into the network of the world market. The highly fragmented management structures of multinational corporations, remote digital information technology control, and the rules of the free-market economy obscure the bloody face of capitalist exploitation and control. Under the guise of a "New World Order," imperialism continues to obscure and rewrite the cultural texts of colonies, exercising ideological hegemony and domination. Even gender relations between men and women have been reduced to tools of dominance used to coordinate the interests of the local patriarchal strata under colonial rule with those of the colonizers. It can be said that within the relationship between colonizers and the Third World, there exists a crisis management structure more ingenious and concealed than economic exploitation or territorial conquest.
(1) The Spatial Displacement of Imperialist Crisis Management
In the era of globalization, the development of "micro-electronic capitalism" has changed traditional concepts of time and space. The crises of imperialism have been displaced from the interior of nations to the spaces between nation-states—to the Third World. The globalization of capital contains a new, more secretive framework for crisis management and regulation. In Western countries, a virtuous cycle has formed between welfare policies, anti-poverty policies, democratic elections, and ideology. This has led to the decline or even disappearance of working-class movements, as capitalism achieves control over its own political crises internally. The routes of capital wealth traverse the entire world, integrating scattered world markets into a system of "mondialization." As Marx and Engels wrote in the Manifesto of the Communist Party: "The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of Reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood." The flexible production of multinational corporations has exacerbated the inequality of the New World Order and the deformed development of the North and South; the North represents powerful transnational capital, while the South accumulates a massive displaced population. "To maintain the circulation and growth of industrial capital, and for the subsequent management tasks within 19th-century territorial capitalism, systems of transport, law, and standardized education were developed, accompanied by the destruction of industries, the redistribution of land, and the transfer of raw materials to colonial countries." To reduce capital turnover time, "civilizing" tools such as railways, postal services, and unified judicial procedures were established. It can be said that in Third World countries, colonial capital plays a "civilizing role." [2]
(2) The Gender Displacement of Labor-Capital Contradictions
Due to the global and dispersed nature of capitalist production, the diversity of objects of economic development, and the internal fragmentation of workers across geography and interests, the most vulnerable labor groups find it difficult to form effective labor unions, let alone possess a unified political and philosophical terminology to represent themselves. "In the postcolonial condition, the 'working class' has effectively been replaced by 'Third World subalterns and women.'" In the pursuit of absolute surplus value, the tentacles of capital reach into the most backward and impoverished regions, finding cheaper female and child labor to replace male workers. As Marx and Engels pointed out in the Manifesto of the Communist Party: "The less the skill and exertion of strength implied in manual labour, in other words, the more modern industry becomes developed, the more is the labour of men superseded by that of women." In the context of Post-Fordism and the explosion of global homework [3], Marx's foresight has been fully realized. Extracting surplus value from the female body has become an important channel for imperialism to resolve its crises.
(3) Imperialist Crisis Management as an Interweaving of Pre-modernity and Modernity
Technological progress facilitates the pursuit of relative surplus value for capital, but it also increases capital expenditures, which to some extent limits the realization of capital. To alleviate this contradiction, developed countries maintain labor legislation and environmental regulation in postcolonial regions in a relatively primitive state. With the rapid development of telecommunications technology, intensified competition, and the accelerated obsolescence of fixed capital, comprador economies in the Third World are forced to accept outdated machinery and backward industries, leaving them perpetually at the low end and downstream of the production chain. Today, the barbaric colonial history of Western countries is far from over; developed countries obtain cheap labor and raw materials through technological control. In the Third World, imperialist crisis management exhibits pre-modern characteristics. Meanwhile, in post-industrial cultural nations like the United States, economic oppression exists as an exploitation hidden "elsewhere in the world."
In short, within the global system manipulated by capitalism, a persistent hegemony and exploitation remain. Facing this situation, postcolonial critical theorists began to reflect on the material and cultural heritage of colonialism, focusing on the living conditions of "Third World" ethnic minorities and seeking for them a political identity characterized by heterogeneity and difference. Spivak's analysis of the theory of imperialist crisis management, combined with Marx's labor theory of value and the living conditions of "Third World" women, has opened a new path for the critique of globalization.
II. A Political-Economic Interpretation of the Theory of Imperialist Crisis Management
Over the past decades, as information technology and mechanized production have grown rapidly, the claim that labor is no longer the primary factor of production in developed economies has gained acceptance. Diagnoses of society from multiculturalism and post-structuralism have largely avoided the critical paradigm of political economy. Under such circumstances, Spivak advocates for a re-reading of Marx's texts from a Third World standpoint, thereby revealing how the use-value of labor power is obscured and suppressed in commodity exchange.
(1) Capital Consumes the Use-Value of Labor Power
Marx argued that a commodity is a unity of use-value and exchange-value. To exchange two items with different uses, there must be a universal equivalent (such as money). In the "salto mortale" [4] from commodity to money, the heterogeneous factors of different items are obscured, allowing them to be exchanged according to an abstract, common substance or proportion. That is to say, money represents the exchange-value of the commodity. Marx further pointed out that the secret of commodity fetishism lies in the fact that: "The commodity-form... reflects the social characteristics of men's own labour as objective characteristics of the products of labour themselves, as the socio-natural properties of these things. Hence it also reflects the social relation of the producers to the sum total of labour as a social relation between objects, a relation which exists apart from and outside the producers." Marx's purpose in clarifying commodity theory was to reveal the social relations between labor and capital embodied behind it. Spivak applies a deconstructive methodology to re-interpret the issue of workers' labor power, concluding that: "Capital consumes the use-value of labor power."
For Marx, the abstract process of exchange erases not only the specific utility of individual commodities but also the human labor power necessary to produce them. In short, the human labor required to produce a commodity is stripped away from the commodity's content during exchange. Spivak points out that a concrete example of this abstraction of use-value can be seen in the production and consumption of Nike sneakers. In advertisements, Nike shoes are commodities meticulously packaged by merchants, and their price (i.e., exchange-value) is hidden [5]. At the same time, the labor conditions of Indonesian female workers sweating on the production lines are also obscured. In Marx's terms, this process of abstraction deprives the use-value of its specific meaning in commodity exchange. Nike advertisements ignore the fact of the hard labor performed by many Third World women—the very labor that makes the production of the commodity possible.
Marx defined the residue of human labor left behind in this abstract process as a "ghostly" [phantom-like] existence. Spivak argues that Marx placed "use-value" in a "blurred, untheorized state." She believes that the problem with previous interpretations of Marx's theory of value was that value was defined either from the perspective of use-value or from the perspective of pure exchange-value. Consequently, the ghostly existence of human labor was forgotten, exchange-value was transformed into money, and capital circulation was depicted as an inevitable and necessary process. Spivak emphasizes that "use-value is both internal and external to the system of value determination": on the one hand, an object can have use-value without having value (by not participating in exchange); on the other hand, use-value is an inseparable part of exchange-value. It is this contradictory state that makes use-value a "lever of deconstruction." Spivak thus emphasizes how the ghostly existence of human labor operates as an "indeterminate possibility"—in other words, "the capitalist circulation system can be interrupted or even potentially subverted." Spivak's deconstructive reading of Marx's labor theory of value has a strong practical orientation. The logic of contemporary global capitalism attempts to erase the use-value of subaltern [6] female labor; however, it is precisely the use of the productive bodies of subaltern women that provides the cheap labor resources and the possibility for cultural self-representation for the accumulation of First World wealth. In fact, Spivak's attempt to deconstruct the capitalist system of value determination is not only a vivid development of the contemporary significance of the labor theory of value but also a call to improve the silenced state of Third World women in culture, politics, and economics. Therefore, "any critique of the labor theory of value that considers the theory inapplicable to the post-industrial era ignores the dark presence of the Third World."
(2) Global Exploitation of Capital and Imperialist Crisis Management
Marxism is the methodological foundation for Spivak's analysis of imperialist crisis theory. Spivak states: "What Marxism can truly offer us is a global system; the greatest contribution of Marxism in the Third World is the theory of crisis." Along with the expansion of the world market, imperialist crisis management has overflowed traditional political boundaries, and globalization has made capital logic more flexible in using technological means and strategic vision to plunder surplus value. The structural crisis of capitalism—the irreconcilable class contradiction between "worker and capitalist"—has been transformed into a global exploitation model between imperialism and the Third World. Therefore, Spivak advocates for understanding the "economic myths" created by capitalism within international relations and broader power structures.
In her essay "Soul-Writing," Spivak points out that international law today colludes with international capital, and that the legal mechanism of capital—the Group of Seven (G7)—carries the subjectivity of capital. A simple glance at the relevant documents reveals that the aid packages of these institutions come with strings attached, such as requirements to purchase certain commodities or specific quotas for hiring workers of different nationalities in a given year. She asks: "What is 'new' about the international 'new' in the global summits since Bandung [7], including the old GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) and the current WTO (World Trade Organization)?" In fact, without reading these documents, people might believe these institutions are helping other countries develop. She writes: "The relationship between West and East, rewritten today as North and South, still operates on the basis of producing more 'absolute surplus value' and less 'relative surplus value'." To extract profit, developed countries intervene from the outside to the point of restructuring or dismantling labor legislation and environmental regulations in postcolonial regions. Spivak provides the following example: with the help of computers, Lehman Brothers made $2 million in 15 minutes, while on the other side of the world, a woman in Sri Lanka must work 2,287 minutes to earn enough to buy a single T-shirt. Here, the management of capitalist crisis presents a "situation where pre-modernity and post-modernity are intertwined." Citizens of those liberal-democratic nations forget that their freedom and prosperity come at the cost of the exhaustion of the bodies, labor, and resources of Third World peoples. Furthermore, they exploit the suffering of these vulnerable groups during civil wars or famines to enrich global media companies and their shareholders, creating surplus value in the realms of spectacle, entertainment, and spirit for the "First World."
The theory of imperialist crisis management also possesses superior discursive resources in the epistemological field, which Spivak calls "epistemic violence." This concept refers to the ideological mechanism producing a knowledge system with clear signifiers; this system carries a series of symbolic images and values that interact with material interests to lay the foundation of legitimacy for Western colonial expansion. That is to say, there is a relationship of complicity between the cultural accumulation of colonialism and its economic expansion. Behind the economic structure of the international division of labor lies a super-powered cultural and political driver. Amidst the pervasive propaganda of ideological indoctrination and media advertising, the working class appears to have accepted the pleasures of consumerism, losing the possibility of rebellion. If we shift our cognitive perspective slightly, we find that gender contradictions have become a necessary condition for capital's self-realization; under the epistemic violence of gendered ideology, women suffer double oppression. "The greatest victims of the recent deterioration of the international division of labor are women. In the current situation, they are the true reserve army of labor. For them, patriarchal social relations have intensified the production of women as new objects of super-exploitation." The consequence is that economic competition in production sharpens gender antagonism: "In the neo-feudalization of electronic capitalism, the situation has become particularly bad... In this neo-feudalization, men are set against women." Imperialist crisis management achieves a gender displacement—gender contradictions obscure the contradiction between labor and capital, allowing capital to extricate itself while capitalist states reap the profits.
Through a deconstructive reading of Marx's labor theory of value, Spivak finds that labor remains the sole source of value creation; no matter how active socialized capital (a byproduct of civilized production) may be, it has not moved away from the presuppositions of the slave mode of production. Imperialism absorbs external fields into its own structure through the marketization of capital on a world scale and the "center-periphery" dependent international division of labor, pushing its own crisis management into broader spaces. Today, capitalist crisis management is achieved on the basis of an increasingly severe subalternization [8] in "Other" spaces such as overseas markets and the Third World. It must be acknowledged that the development of the North and Europe is sustained by the exploitation of poor regions. Furthermore, economically dominant countries "block" the development of the Third World, keeping them in a secondary position. Supported by digital technology and telecommunications surveillance, the current international division of labor makes the oppression of women even more complex.
III. Postcolonial Feminist Critique: Speaking for Subaltern Women
In the process of imperialist crisis displacement, subaltern women in the Third World are the first to become victims. Linking the economic oppression of imperialism with the cultural oppression of patriarchy is Spivak’s fundamental stance in studying women's issues. Spivak also criticizes Western feminism, arguing that its claimed universal "sisterhood" reproduces the hegemonic logic of imperialism from another perspective. At the same time, she emphasizes the importance of placing the cultural analysis of women's issues within the organization of production in the context of globalization. The British postcolonial theorist Bart Moore-Gilbert once evaluated Spivak thus: "Her postcolonial analysis must first embody a 'persistent recognition of the heterogeneity' relevant to postcolonial culture." Starting from a postcolonial feminist perspective to speak for subaltern women, Spivak no longer regards Western feminism as the paradigm for women's liberation, which is specifically reflected in the following three aspects.
(1) Deconstructing the discursive hegemony of Western feminism
In the 1970s, following Jacques Derrida's critique of phallocentrism and the postmodern feminist Luce Irigaray's interpretation of Freud, the threads of feminist theory and practice became clearer, and feminist critical theory experienced a revival. As a vanguard feminist, Spivak realized that "exploiting feminism at the right time is clearly the best plan for reaching society." By analyzing theories of women's discourse within an international framework, Spivak recognized the crisis of European consciousness in feminism. "The cult of the female subject-consciousness is basically limited to the European and Anglo-American spheres, and it is on this basis that feminist norms are established." When academic feminists speak for themselves, they are convinced that "the personal is political." For other women in the world, it is difficult for us to access their personal micro-consciousness; we can only rely on the limited information provided by colonialism. "If we rely entirely on conferences and papers provided by trained Western intellectuals, we will be unable to talk with the women there." Spivak recognizes that although the historical experiences of white and bourgeois women are complex and arduous, they are often linked politically, economically, and culturally to the concerns and interests of the empire. Spivak questions the global sisterhood between "First World" and "Third World" women, pointing out the complicity between Western feminism and imperialism. "The history of Western feminism is implied within the larger history of European colonialism; the consequence is that contemporary Western feminism is in a state of repeating the individualism of 19th-century bourgeois women's colonial stance toward 'Third World' women." The core assumptions of white feminist theory ignore, reduce, or discard the heterogeneity of other women, masking the difference and pluralism of women's issues. For poor women in the South, compared to the gender politics and gender oppression that concern Northern women, solving the problem of economic exploitation and providing basic needs such as clean water and children's education are far more important. Spivak’s critique of this reality is not to clear the way for the politically responsible Euro-American women's movement, but to make room for writing the true history of Third World women.
(2) Tracing the subject-consciousness of non-mainstream cultures and the subaltern
In her book A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present, Spivak constructs the subaltern Other as "the native informant." She pays special attention to ethnic minorities, asking why their voices are obscured and why they are negated by rational knowledge. In the preface to the book, Spivak points out that whether in classical philosophical texts or historical archives, there is a presupposition that the voice of the subaltern is "foreclosed." The concept of "foreclosure" is invoked from psychoanalysis, referring to "the ego not only resisting incompatible concepts but also denying their influence, as if the concept had never occurred within the ego." Through the operation of Jacques Lacan’s theory of the Symbolic, "foreclosure" refers to the oppressed being expelled, becoming not only unspeakable but having no means to speak. Today, "the most typical of those foreclosed are the poorest women in the South." While these women are constructed as European reference points, they are strategically excluded from imperialist ideology.
(3) Emphasizing speaking for women within broader institutional environments and production organizations
This construction of the "foreclosed" is not a one-dimensional process but the composite result of various forces working together. Spivak further points out that imperialism and knowledge production are two sides of the same coin; the education system, human rights organizations, and nativism all join in the complicity—ensuring that the voice of the subaltern is not heard. She gives the example of the Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) in India: Women’s World Banking (WWB) provides loans to Third World women who belong to certain labor organizations, but most Indian domestic women have no employers and must make their own living, so they were excluded by this institutional regulation. Through the advocacy of lawyer Ela Bhatt, SEWA was established. Later, this event actually became a case used by Women’s World Banking to boast of its achievements, interpreted by its spokesperson as: "Chandra Behn held her hand and said that Women's World Banking was their benefactor." The actual situation, however, was: "Members of SEWA had to scrape together the minimum amount of capital themselves just to create an account." Spivak points out that in this event, media reports and official documents all covered up the logic of how power operates; women were strategically excluded from organized resistance. From this, it can also be seen that Spivak has become increasingly outspoken in criticizing global development policies that focus on Third World women. As early as the 1995 UN World Conference on Women, Spivak emphasized that women living in the Global South suffer the greatest economic impact, yet they have no representation on the international political stage. Spivak’s views were criticized by Arif Dirlik [9], who argued: "The fact that Spivak’s postcolonial critique is welcomed in First World academic institutions precisely proves that postcolonial intellectuals are 'beneficiaries' rather than 'victims' of global capitalism."
Spivak provides a postcolonial reading of Western feminism's universalist claims, focuses on the plight of women, and calls for a serious consideration of the material history and lives of Third World women within a globalized perspective. She analyzes discursive resources and the production process of neo-colonial knowledge from the perspective of political practice, opposing the nostalgic search for the voices of "natives" and focusing instead on examining the process by which such voices are cancelled. Discursive hegemony and epistemic violence obscure the developmental aspirations of Third World women, resulting in them being only "represented," "spoken for," and "signified." It can be said that advocating for the consideration of women-centered economic development policies in transnational spaces is Spivak’s ethical responsibility as an organic intellectual.
IV. Brief Conclusion
Spivak argues that within the current new global order, capitalism utilizes information and communication technologies and new media technologies to achieve a transfer of capitalist contradictions across both geographical locations and gender through the globalization of production and exploitation, thereby bringing the imperialist crisis under control. Within the context of neo-colonialism, the imperialist crisis employs ideological "epistemic violence" [10] to form a benign cultural cycle in an indirect and invisible manner. The trend of globalization in the Third World and the unequal international division of labor represent a continuation of imperialist colonial plunder and political control. Today, the essence of North-South relations is a continuation of the 19th-century "capitalist-worker" relationship. On the surface, the North appears to be "aiding" the South, just as imperialism did in the past—attempting to "civilize" [11] colonial nations they regarded as savage lands. These forms of false consciousness "foreclose" the fact that the economic assistance and human rights politics of developed nations mask the underlying manipulation of capital. Facing more complex and hidden forms of exploitation, Spivak critically points out that culturalist and positivist research fails to reveal the wealth support behind Western "liberal democracy." She advocates for rethinking Marx's labor theory of value, analyzing the structural inequality of capitalism, and insisting that labor remains the sole source of surplus value. She further asserts that Third World women have become a new source of cheap labor, and their bodies have become sites of genuine super-exploitation. It is precisely from the perspective of postcolonial feminist critique that Spivak uses Marx's labor theory of value as a deconstructive lever to interpret the contemporary transformation of imperialist crisis management.
(Author’s affiliation: School of Marxism, Nanjing University) Web Editor: Tongxin Source: Foreign Theoretical Trends, Issue 4, 2021